Team Productivity – What You Need to Know This Week

Here’s a look at three interesting stories currently in the news with ramifications for your team’s productivity.

1. Meeting with and returning employees’ calls and messages promptly pays off in engagement

Ever thought that your degree of enthusiasm about and engagement with your work is highly dependent on how your manager operates? New research from Gallup confirms it, reporting that up to 70% of that feeling is based on specific activities that your manager does or doesn’t do. The State of the American Manager Report finds that employees who meet regularly with their managers are almost three times as likely to be engaged in their work; managers who return employees’ calls or messages within 24 hours have the most engaged teams; and engaged employees are more likely to say their managers help them set work priorities and performance goals and that their managers hold them accountable for their performance.

2. No more forever projects

If you’ve ever wondered how it is that projects seem to become permanent fixtures even if they’re not the best use of your team’s time, you’ll appreciate Diana Kimball’s piece on Medium about getting rid of “forever projects.” “From now on, every project is one-time-only,” she writes. “Treat beginnings like endings: celebrate them, document them, let someone else pick up where you leave off. If the project’s worth repeating, there’s nothing to say you can’t still be the standard-bearer. But at least it’s a choice. By ending well, you give yourself the freedom to begin again. These days, all my projects start as experiments. No forceful promises, no forever projects.”

3. Security policies are lowering worker productivity

Workplace security policies result in too many passwords, access protocols, and workarounds that expose the business to risk, ultimately lowering worker productivity, says a new global security survey from Dell. 91% of workers surveyed said that their productivity is negatively impacted by employer security measures; 92% are negatively impacted by the limits of their organization’s remote-access policies; more than 50% said changes in security measures have increased the day-to-day impact on their productivity in the last 18 months; and 87% feel security standards are a higher priority than employee convenience. And perhaps unsurprisingly, nearly 70 percent of IT professionals say employee workarounds to avoid IT-imposed security measures pose the greatest risk to their organizations. To be clear, this isn’t about dissatisfaction with unavoidable safeguards; the report points out that a context-aware security approach — one that evaluates the context surrounding each access request and adapts requirements in real-time — could solve most of these issues without compromising security.